Our Afghanistan Programs

Growing Stability for Children, One Family at a Time

As the wars seemingly faded and the attention disappeared, hundreds of thousands of displaced Afghani children were left behind, orphaned and homeless, to fend for themselves. These children would wander from village to village, hoping to have their basic needs met: food and maybe shelter. Stability was an unattainable dream.  Education was unlikely. And with too many mouths to feed already, few foster families are willing to stretch limited resources further on children who aren’t their own.

But Global Roots has changed that.

Using our foundational Children’s Garden Program as a launchpad, Global Roots has brought stability to hundreds of Afghanistan’s displaced youth.  Our inaugural Baharak Children’s Garden was implemented in Badakhshan to great success!  Currently, over 100 children are benefitting from balanced, nutritious meals. What’s more, the guarantee of those meals has enabled local families to open their homes to our program’s children! That is 100 fewer children with no home and 20 more children who have access to stability and education!

But we didn’t stop there.

After the success of our project in Badakhshan, Global Roots had the “street cred”  it needed to expand. In 2017 we launched a second Children’s Garden at a decrepit orphanage in the important city of Faizabad.

Executive Director, Rick Montgomery, will travel to Afghanistan in Spring 2018 to work directly with the managers of the orphanage we support Follow along with Rick’s progress by checking back here and by connecting with our social media (see right side column)!

For more information on our specific programs in Afghanistan, click below.

Program History

Global Roots founder, Rick Montgomery, traveled to Afghanistan for the first time in 2010 with the support of his high school classmate, USAF Lt. Colonel John O. Holm.  While waiting for helicopters to be assigned to his humanitarian mission, Montgomery was exposed by an orphanage director to some of the pervasive issues within the local orphanage administration.  Moved to find better solutions for the multitude of displaced children in Afghanistan, Montgomery immediately dove into the system, providing badly needed supplies and coordinating with other active NGOs to explore solutions.  One such collaboration lead to Global Roots’ most valuable resource in Afghanistan: our country director Janagha.

With the help of Janagha, Global Roots was able to launch a signature Children’s Garden in the village of Baharak not long after.  Children, displaced or orphaned by years of instability, often wander from village to village in this reason.  With no stable structures governing their young lives, these children all too often end up recruited into militant madrassas or other dangerous situations.  Our Baharak Children’s Garden, which included a chicken egg farm, proved to be an invaluable tool in placing these children with stable families.  These families, who otherwise did not have the means to provide for additional mouths, were able to open up their homes with the certainty that they could keep everyone fed.

This program was expanded not long after, with the addition of an orchard hosting 300 fruit trees.  Not only do these trees advance the program of food security for Baharak’s displaced children, but the revenue from the sale of excess produce will make this program sustainable and self-sufficient!

Following the undeniable success of this initial program, Global Roots has continued to expand this model with Afghanistan. A second food security project for children was launched at an massive Fayzabad orphanage in 2017 and plans are now being drawn up to create a project just for orphaned and abandoned girls in Baharak in early 2018. Our Afghanistan Girls Garden will be the first food security program addressing the needs of orphaned Afghan girls EVER!

Interested in helping us further this success??  Click here!